Challenging the monolingual paradigm in secondary dual-language instruction: Reducing language-as-problem with the 2-1-L2 model

• Published in: Bilingual research journal 2016-12, Vol.39 (3-4), p.279-295
• Main Author: Przymus, Steve Daniel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access to Education; Bilingual Education; Bilingualism; Charter Schools; Code Switching (Language); Course Content; English (Second Language); English as a second language; English as a second language instruction; English as a second language teaching methods; Equal Education; Focus Groups; Immersion Programs; Instructional Innovation; Language diversity; Language instruction; Mexican Americans; Monolingualism; Online Surveys; Recursion; Second Language Learning; Secondary School Students; Spanish; Spanish language; Student Attitudes; Teaching Methods; United States Government (Course)
• ISSN: 1523-5882; 1523-5890
• DOI: 10.1080/15235882.2016.1220995

This study reports on an innovative approach to dual-language instruction (DLI) at the secondary-education level and introduces the 2-1-L2 model. The context of the study is an American Government class at a public charter high school in Tucson, Arizona, where the 2-1-L2 model was used for nine weeks to structure daily 90-minute lessons into a 30-minute immersion in English, a 30-minute immersion in Spanish, and a final 30-minute section of hybrid language practices, such as translanguaging (Bhabha, 1994; García & Wei, 2013; Kramsch & Uryu, 2012). The culturally and linguistically diverse participants represented an almost equal division of recursive dynamic bilinguals and dynamic bilinguals, plus an emergent bilingual who had recently moved from Mexico to the United States (García, Kleifgen, & Falchi, 2008; García & Sylvan, 2011). Through the bilingual structure of the 2-1-L2, all students were treated and valued as bilingual content users, as they learned American Government content together, an identity that they claimed for themselves. Findings suggest that the 2-1-L2 model may contribute to providing equal access to world language/English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction for students in content area classes at the secondary level and offer a response to the Language-as-Problem "Θ(threat)-inversion" (Richard Ruiz, personal communication/lecture PowerPoint slides, August 2013).